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Keystone Pipeline= 35 permanent jobs

"A massive cloud of black dust that swept across the Detroit River into Windsor, Canada this week has been linked to piles of petroleum coke, a by-product of tar sands oil illegally stored in Detroit by Koch Carbon."

Sounds healthy...go on...

"In May the New York Times profiled the Detroit dumping grounds of pet coke at an industrial site owned by Koch Carbon, a company controlled by wealthy industrialists Charles and David Koch, which sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon by-product overseas in China and India where it serves as a cheaper, dirtier alternative to coal. There is also strong demand for the by-product in Latin America, where it is used in cement-making kilns. "

Shocked at the ownership but ,exporting cheaper, dirtier alternative to coal sounds altruistic...still creating jobs...

"It was only last November that exports of pet coke produced by Canadian oil sands began to arrive at the site, and seemed to catch local government off guard."

It's certainly already entering the US and generating jobs...

"Company representatives for Detroit Bulk Storage who handle the industrial site have said they were not aware that they required a permit to openly store pet coke in Detroit’s riverside, though they have been following “best practices” in handling the piles of pet coke waste."

I didn't know I couldn't do that...

"Detroit Bulk announced earlier in July that it has stopped accepting new shipments of pet coke. Koch Carbon, which did not respond to a request for comment from the Toronto Star, has said that it plans to store the pet coke in another, as yet undetermined US state."

I'm guessing North Dakota. Feel free to move downwind and river of the new site Deacman.
 
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DeacMan said:
Which is already wrong. Oil that goes through the pipeline today is already sold in the United States. I probably fill my tank up on it all the time.
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Pretty much this statement of fact on your part.

And/or the possible problems that should be considered, like I don't know the 14 leaks Canada can't cleanup, and the one in Michigan we can't clean up.

And/or if you are confident enough that it's safe to move next to the processing facility or pipeline.

And/or that we refine 28,000 barrels a day of this crap in a much more expensive refining process which needs to be applied to deliver significantly lower quality product that has dangerous by-products, and isn't changing the price of oil in our economy which consumes 18.5 million barrels a day.

Other than that, completely unrelated.
 
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Which again has what to do with building a pipeline? You think the oil in Canada or North Dakota isn't going to make it's way to and through the U.S. one way or another. A question we should be asking is what is worse for the environment, current delivery methods or alternative methods. Because the oil is going to come out of the ground and will be consumed. And whether the pipeline or other means of moving oil are worse for the environment is an issue that is very much open for debate. I won't pretend I know the answer to that one.
 
$5 billion project has to come with some economic benefit. This is a good way to invest. Of course those who draw political lines around everything will say otherwise.
 
aocs3281 said:
$5 billion project has to come with some economic benefit. This is a good way to invest. Of course those who draw political lines around everything will say otherwise.
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Again if this is such a win-win, why aren't the Canadians doing it? $5B in their economy is probably like $100B in ours. Plus it's their oil.
It makes no sense they wouldn't want to do the project themselves.

Further, it's much less expensive to ship the oil from Vancouver than from Texas.

Why don't the Canadians want the jobs, the additional profits and the additional tax revenues?
 
DeacMan said:
Which again has what to do with building a pipeline? You think the oil in Canada or North Dakota isn't going to make it's way to and through the U.S. one way or another. A question we should be asking is what is worse for the environment, current delivery methods or alternative methods. Because the oil is going to come out of the ground and will be consumed. And whether the pipeline or other means of moving oil are worse for the environment is an issue that is very much open for debate. I won't pretend I know the answer to that one.
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OK, you obviously have no fucking clue what you are talking about on this topic.
 
aocs3281 said:
$5 billion project has to come with some economic benefit. This is a good way to invest. Of course those who draw political lines around everything will say otherwise.
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Benefit to who is the question. And it obvious has some risk, likely not to the people who benefit.
 
ONW said:
Pretty much this statement of fact on your part.
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Are you (and others) actually saying oil from Alberta oil/tar sands isn't already going into US refineries for US gasoline consumption? The entire point of the pipeline is to get it to Gulf Coast refineries and double the output from Alberta. Where do you think those refined products go? It'll go into the US supply. Just because they sell to China/India doesn't mean all of it goes there.

http://www.cdnoilsands.com/energy-marketing/Markets/default.aspxhttp://www.cdnoilsands.com/energy-marketing/Markets/default.aspx

http://www.suncor.com/en/about/232.aspx

Suncor operates refineries in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, Canada, and in Colorado, USA.

Commerce City, Colo.: 98,000-barrel-per-day refinery produces gasoline, diesel fuel and paving-grade asphalt


We've completed major improvements to our refineries, greatly increasing the amount of oil sands crude that can be refined, while improving environmental performance.

At the Commerce City refinery, a $540 million (US $445 million) upgrade has enabled the refinery to meet clean fuels regulations and handle a wider range of oil sands products.
 
PhDeac said:
Benefit to who is the question. And it obvious has some risk, likely not to the people who benefit.
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The US public is using and will use more of the product. Who do you think? Energy production of every kind requires an environmental footprint. You can't run away from that fact.
 
I'm out. This is pointless.
 
ONW said:
I'm out. This is pointless.
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Not sure why it's pointless, there are a lot of pretty cryptic statement in this thread that can mean a lot of things.

The Alberta oil can be processed and used in this country, that's a fact.

There seems to be 2 different meanings of "dirty" when I read articles about it: the traditional sulfur issue meaning, and the notion it has a higher carbon output because it's heavy. Sulfur can be eliminated by a number of ways (my company has a good process) so the only real issue is the one involving climate change. That's the one I believe the State Department modeled and found to be not an issue (worse via other transportation methods).

Pollution wise from spills, it's more viscous so less of a problem in a spill. Sulfur isn't a true "toxin" in a spill, it's just a toxin when you burn it because it turns to sulfuric acid in the atmosphere (acid rain problem). Spills could literally be drips as bad as a faucet drip too so I'm not sure I'd trust any claims there without digging into the actual specifics. The problem with spills seems to be a lot of hype IMO, like it always seems to be.

So I'm not sure why we wouldn't do it. The temp jobs are big, there will be permanent jobs. We need jobs. It's probably overall better energy/pollution wise because of the location of the source. Seems like a no brainer. I've been baffled by the outcry, but I guess it's the only "big oil" thing to rally against these days.
 
pourdeac said:
The US public is using and will use more of the product. Who do you think? Energy production of every kind requires an environmental footprint. You can't run away from that fact.
Click to expand...

WRONG!!! This is the world's dirtiest oil product.
 
pourdeac said:
Not sure why it's pointless, there are a lot of pretty cryptic statement in this thread that can mean a lot of things.

The Alberta oil can be processed and used in this country, that's a fact.

There seems to be 2 different meanings of "dirty" when I read articles about it: the traditional sulfur issue meaning, and the notion it has a higher carbon output because it's heavy. Sulfur can be eliminated by a number of ways (my company has a good process) so the only real issue is the one involving climate change. That's the one I believe the State Department modeled and found to be not an issue (worse via other transportation methods).

Pollution wise from spills, it's more viscous so less of a problem in a spill. Sulfur isn't a true "toxin" in a spill, it's just a toxin when you burn it because it turns to sulfuric acid in the atmosphere (acid rain problem). Spills could literally be drips as bad as a faucet drip too so I'm not sure I'd trust any claims there without digging into the actual specifics. The problem with spills seems to be a lot of hype IMO, like it always seems to be.

So I'm not sure why we wouldn't do it. The temp jobs are big, there will be permanent jobs. We need jobs. It's probably overall better energy/pollution wise because of the location of the source. Seems like a no brainer. I've been baffled by the outcry, but I guess it's the only "big oil" thing to rally against these days.
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Negative.

"The proposed route for Keystone XL crosses over the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the country’s largest sources of freshwater that provides drinking water and irrigation for millions of Americans.

There have already been 81 significant oil spills so far in 2013, according the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. A spill on the Ogallala Aquifer would be far worse than any of these spills because of the unique properties of tar sands that make clean up in water particularly difficult.


The 2010 Kalamazoo River spill revealed that tar sands oil sinks to the bottom of bodies of water, making it much harder to clean up. As Michigan State University Professor Steve Hamilton said on NPR “It’s not quite solid, and it’s not quite liquid. You could pick it up and shape it into a ball practically.” The Kalamazoo cleanup effort has already cost over $820 million, and could top $1 billion."


"U.S. pipelines average 280 significant spills a year. TransCanada’s original Keystone pipeline experienced 12 separate spills in the United States in the first year of operation– nearly one every month. One of those spills alone released 21,000 gallons of dirty tar sands oil. Between the U.S. and Canada, the original Keystone pipeline had “over 30 spills” in its first year, according to a report by Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute."

"The report did not address whether spills of diluted bitumen are harder to clean up than spills of conventional crude oil. If the Keystone XL pipeline gets the federal permit it needs for construction, it will carry up to 800,000 barrels of oil a day across land above the Ogallala aquifer, the main source of drinking water for much of the Great Plains.

Cleanup continues of diluted bitumen that spilled three years ago into Michigan's Kalamazoo River. In another spill in late March, a pipeline ruptured in Mayflower, Ark., gushing 200,000 gallons through a residential neighborhood and into a nearby lake. So far, somewhat more than half the oil spilled there has been recovered.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/28/nation/la-na-keystone-pipeline-20130629

"It's tougher than they thought," Terry Abel of the Energy Resources Conservation Board said Tuesday. "It's tougher than we thought, too."

Reclaiming mine tailings has been one of the industry's major environmental challenges. Much of that waste material is composed of particles so fine they take years or even decades to settle out of tailings ponds. Without a way to hasten the process, oilsands tailings ponds have grown from 50 square kilometres in 2006 to 176 square kilometres now."

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/06/11/alberta-oilsands-cleanup-tailings-harder_n_3422814.html

"Tar sands diluted bitumen spills are more damaging and difficult to clean. The 2010 Enbridge tar sands spill into the Kalamazoo River highlighted an industry that was unprepared to address the unique challenges associated with tar sands diluted bitumen spills. Nearly three years after Enbridge spilled a million gallons of tar sands crude into the Kalamazoo River watershed and almost a billion dollars has been spent on cleanup, and 38 miles of that river are still contaminated.

Tar sands diluted bitumen is a mixture of very light petrochemicals and very heavy bitumen. Once spilled in a waterbody, the light petrochemicals – including toxins such as benzene and toluene - gas off, leaving the heavy bitumen to sink. As Inside Climate covered in Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of, during the Enbridge tar sands spill in Kalamazoo, Michigan, significant heavy crude sank below the water’s surface and traveled along the river bed. EPA’s on-site spill coordinator Mark Durno summed it up:

The Michigan and Arkansas accidents show "that this material is very difficult to remove from water bodies and raise questions about its short- and long-term effects on the health of the people exposed to it after a pipeline failure,"

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/aswift/tar_sands_pipeline_safety_risk.html
 
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Why would you measure the value of a pipeline by the number of employees that will be needed to maintain the pipeline?
 
Because it has zero reason to allow to be built other than jobs as none of the oil will be used here. It will delivered to Texas ans shipped to Asia.
 
AMCDeac said:
Why would you measure the value of a pipeline by the number of employees that will be needed to maintain the pipeline?
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Yeah. It's ridiculous yet politicians use jobs to justify all kinds of things.
 
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